Detecting overlap of heating and hot water

Hi,

I’ve been trying to figure out how to automate away an issue that I find sometimes occurs with my heating and hot water but struggling a bit and wondering if anyone can help…

I have a hot water tank and it heats up overnight, but also around 4:30 in the afternoon. The overnight one is always fine as no heating is running, but sometimes in the winter when the heating happens to be running at the same time at 4:30 I think it takes priority and the water isn’t heated as much, this can be noticeable if someone takes a bath or something particularly.

I have a Hive system and all the sensors are available in HA to detect states and most of the control is already done from there. What I would like to do is detect when the heating is running for a certain proportion of the time the hot water is on (hot water runs for 45 mins, so maybe if it’s running 20 mins or more within that) and either automatically extend the water heating time to offset or alert me and give me the option to do so.

It’s the whole detecting an overlap of the two things for a period of time that I’m not quite sure how to do, so wondered if anyone had any ideas?

Thanks.

That priority behavior is usually part of the zone controller. Look at that to see how it is setup or wired. Most zone controllers have a setting for “priority domestic hot water” which biases the zone controller towards heating hot water vs the house. Your situation seems opposite so perhaps it’s just wired backwards.

Set up a template binary sensor that is “on” when both are running. Then set a state trigger of the binary sensor being “on” with a duration of 20 minutes.

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Of course, now you say this seems simple answer, thanks!